Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 74.
The president was himself an evangelical Christian and he had gone out of his way to issue executive orders authorizing payments to be made for church operated social service activities where proselytizing was permitted. Many Americans thought bush had jumped over the wall separating church and state and yet some of the evangelical Christians kept insisting on more and more money.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hans Christian Andersen were all "understood" far too quickly by "scholars".
